Information technology systems are essential to any modern business. These systems have grown more and more complex. Today they can include distributed centers located anywhere from a few miles apart to those across the continent or in separate countries. Today, personal computers are common and many businesses employ multiple operating systems from various vendors. Often systems are dispersed in branch offices running critical applications or containing essential data.
Tools are available that integrate operational control of multiple heterogeneous mainframes and distributed systems. These systems include numerous components that are managed. An example of a software tool to manage distributed systems is a workload manager built around business rules, where business rules are also sometimes referred to as policies. Business rules may include the set of application processes used by a business, the relative priorities of the processes, the expected resource needs for each process at any point in time, and the desired performance target for each set of processes. A typical workload manager defines and applies policies. The division of the processes into different groups on the host is done separately from the definition of the policies. Workload groups are usually determined according to their differing requirements and importance to the business. After workload groups are determined, policies are defined. One group might do batch processing of payroll, the other updating a sales database, and another managing communications with customers via a website. With conventional workload managers, each policy is defined by choosing the workload groups that will be running during a range of time and specifying each workload group's resource/performance needs and relative priority during that time.
During different time periods, different policies may be enforced. For example, it might generally be expected that there are more customer communications during a certain period X, so the workload manager may direct more processing resources to customers and less to batch processing payroll during the period X. In another example, in the middle of night more resources might be directed to updating databases before employees come to work and use the processing resources for other needs. According to some conventional schemes, policy A might run eight am to five pm, and policy B may run from five pm to midnight, and so on. Typically, policies are set up in advance and are not changed without manual intervention.
Changes in the host-level environment may affect which set of policies a site wishes to apply. The time-of-day, day-of-week, or day-of-month when such a change occurs may also affect which policies are desired. In conventional systems, the only way to affect a change in the rules enforced by the workload manager is to have a human operator notice the occurrence of the host-level event signaling the change and to manually initiate a new policy. This also requires that the operator have sufficient knowledge of the various business priorities to be able to determine what new policy (i.e., “new set of business rules”) is appropriate for the new conditions. For these and other reasons, improvements are desirable.